musings from a transcendent dimension

Spirituality

(Image: Breughel, “Allegory of Sight” series.)

When we adjust the celestial telescope
that is our spiritual vision,
only the slightest of movements are needed,
a turn of a knob there,
a slight refocusing of the
viewfinder there.

Just enough so that we remove the blur
and the visual defects that distort
the light
and bleeds reality of all of its
exquisite aliveness.

When we do this,
something wonderful
will happen.

Something so utterly astonishing,
it will be like walking a tightrope composed of
lambent strands, stretching out to the horizon
the terminus being an entirely new dimension,
or an numinous landscape
we had only previously encountered
in our most mystical of dreams.

We will be able to peer into
the limitless vistas of the cosmos
and know,
with an inner conviction that shatters all doubt,
that we are swimming in a living
sea,
teeming with
interconnectedness.

When we do this,
the miraculous will become
as commonplace as those
everyday things
so reassuring in their regularity,
like the comforting oscillation of our breathing
or the tides
which, with their mysterious and soothing rhythms,
calm the myriad creatures of the oceans,
into aqueous rest.

The scales,
encrusted with the weight of centuries,
will fall fast from our eyes,
and we will join in
the whirling ecstatic dance
of creation,
with an intensity and an unleashed power that
we never believed we could ever possess.

Before, we could not
take our rightful place on the dance floor,
for we were blind to the
infinite beauty
that swirls all around us,
bathing us in
an unseen light.

Blind,
we could not navigate
the stinging clouds of our unknowing,
which choked us in ignorance,
and could not find ways to quell
the restlessness of our minds.

Blind,
we could not navigate the dense shadows
to find our partner who wants to dance with us to dispel the darkness,
this erstwhile companion
who is,
and always will be,
the ineffable glory
the fiery divine effervescence
that sublime electricity that imbues all of creation with
reverberations of love.

This is the light that ceaselessly flows from eternal springs of truth,
and aches to bring joy
to every darkened corner of our world,
if we will only let it.

When we reconnect with this light,
we finally understand that
the dance and the dancer
are one and the same.

The subtle pulsating energies
that give rise to the sun and the moon and the planets
will be seen by us,
as dazzling explosions of color and of light
magnanimous eruptions in our thought streams, birthing strange and wondrous revelations in our brains
that frees us from our too long imprisonment
and we will feel
on the deepest
of all imaginable levels,
that we are a part of everything
and anything that exists now,
or has ever existed.

After the earth stops shaking,
And these transcendent jewels of wisdom are ours to keep,
a lovely peace,
borne of
a divine and majestic presence,
will gently enfold us
in its mystery and its grace.

After the storm, there is always
an all-encompassing calmness,
where you get to savor what your battles to break through to the sunlight
taught you.

We will be then be catapulted headlong into a thousand new dimensions of being
ways of sharing our precious gift of life
with all others
we scarcely believed
could ever exist.

And when this world is revealed to us
by the divine made manifest,
our joyous tears
will abundantly flow,
baptizing the very ground
upon which we walk,
with their life-giving beneficence.

Unlimited rapture will overtake us,
as we marvel at the sacredness
of every aspect
of existence,
and joy,
will fill our souls to overflowing.

In that glorious moment,
we are given the most wondrous of all gifts
because in that very moment,
when the sleep fell away from our eyes, we are given something so very precious:
the ability to see,
really see,
as if for the very first time
in our lives that are so brief in their unfolding.

Seeing in this way is like
being born anew,
and we will be stunned by the
shimmering freshness of our perceptions.

Everything around us
will be seen as endlessly coruscating waves of color,
rainbows of sentience sanctified by devotion
composed of the
kind of loving radiance
a celestial vibrancy
only found
in the heart.

I have shared this before, but it has recycled its way back energetically as feeling important once again.

Today’s reblog comes from Gabrielle Roth – I just love her! – an incredibly influential teacher of meditative dance, creator of the 5Rhythms movement practice, and a shaman in her own right.

Gabrielle felt that physical movement was an integral key to unlocking spirit and integrating spirit with your sacred temple body. She was dedicated, heart and soul, to exploring ways to engage spirit and creativity through movement, but ultimately to “create life as a work of art” (something we both share) and to access unity of experience as a cosmic dance:

“Mine is the art of inspiring people to turn themselves inside out, transform their suffering into art, their art into awareness, and their awareness into action.” ~ Gabrielle Roth

The end does not justify the means. It is the underlying intention that is important. If a company makes a donation merely to aggrandize an already over-inflated corporate ego, there is, ready-built into that intention, an inherent negative energy that will completely undermine the apparent good intentions. This is a metaphysical axiom that holds true for individuals as well as corporations. One only has to look at a company’s actions in the world to see if the welfare of humanity is what is dearest to their heart. It also might be instructive to read their mission statement, and see if there is any cognitive dissonance between this, and their actions. If there is, no amount of philanthropy will make up for this myopic failure to see that see everything is interconnected. You cannot simultaneously engage in actions that are destructive to certain societal interests, while, at the same time, attempting to assuage your guilt and trying to make yourself look good in the eyes of the world by engaging in a kind of public relations theater. The karmic scales do not work that way.

There is a natural phenomenon known as a murmuration of birds. This is when these magnificent flying creatures are closely grouped together and move in an invisible unison, as if being orchestrated silently behind the hidden veil of things, by one who knows all and loves all. Avian splendor like this fills me with love for all that exists. There are so many beautiful things in the world, that when I stop to think about even one of them, I will be tempted to cease all my worldly activities, and completely surrender to an indescribable bliss that just wells up from within me for no apparent reason.

This murmuration of birds sweetly whispered to us from divine places is merely one of the more dramatic examples of God’s ineffable beauty – a divine message saying to all of us that just because you see me in the skies in these grand displays, does not mean you should stop looking for me in the most ordinary of things and of moments. For, despite what you have been led to believe, that is where you will truly find me. Not in churches, architecturally perfect, yet missing that indefinable something that is spirituality in its essence. You will find that I exist everywhere you look, even in the tiniest thing.

We need to embody the entire spectrum of positive emotions, as we wheel around the sun with seven billion other souls who, like us, have hidden deep within them, unhealed wounds, and hearts that are deeply scarred. Like us, they experienced unimaginably dark nights, where they felt like all hope was ripped completely from them. Like us, they were left all alone and without a single friend to make their endless pain even a little less unbearable.

Whenever we are tempted to lash out in anger towards another, we must keep the mental image of the psychological suffering that this wonderful human being standing before us endured, because we endured it, too. We are all weary travelers, who need to help shoulder the sorrows of each other through our many hardships, and our many moments of feeling so utterly alone, we beg for death, just so our exquisite pain will also die with us. We should also weep with overwhelming joy with them when they have happy news to share with us.

We achieve greater spiritual depth when we hold in our hearts such an intense empathy for others, that the range of emotions we can participate in with them is composed of a palette of so many varied colors and shades, that we know what it feels like living in their skin and their particular set of circumstances. This should part of the mission we cultivate for ourselves, because without the great depths of feeling we hold for others, we become lost. Not only to others, but to ourselves as well.

Too often, we use social media to alienate ourselves from our fellow human beings. This is a tragic waste of our unfathomable human potential, and a misuse of our wonderful divine energy. All of us probably spend far too time on our phones and our computers and all of our ever so clever little devices than we ever should. And, make no mistake about it – I’m as guilty as anybody else of this. Many of us are abundantly clear of the seductive pull of the cyber world and how it completely sucks up all of our precious attention, so much so that often, there is no contemplation of things that truly matter. But I think as we wake up as a species, we will find ways to use social media to make more meaningful connections to each other. By doing this, we will fundamentally transform civilization, and the seismic waves of change effected by this transformation will be felt on both worlds that exist and worlds still waiting to be born.

This new electronic network will be part of a more spiritual outlook, and because it is, it will no longer serve to perpetuate hurtful memes or be a fount of misinformation, but instead, It will help to change our relationship with the rest of humanity in powerful ways, because we will finally be able to deliver on social media’s tantalizing promise to make profound connections with each other in ways that never were possible before the advent of the internet. We will look back, from a far away future when things are the way we always believed they could be, and recall the day when we rubbed the sleep from our eyes, and decided to use social media to foster love for each other instead of finding horrifying new ways to commit widespread murder and destruction.

We have written the bloody book of our seething hatred towards our sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers many times over. We have done this before the creation of a networked society, but now, we have a powerful tool at our disposal. Just think of the possibilities that social media represent. The internet connects human beings, of many different cultural backgrounds and languages. It makes it easier for us to connect instantaneously with people across the entire world. Why can’t we start writing a new chapter of our planetary history? One that, instead of seeing others dirty infidels who we need to distrust, and ultimately, destroy or forever drive from our sight, sees these humans as ourselves in our highest and best aspect, crying out to us to be lovingly embraced?

We will all learn, even the least technologically savvy among us, to see Facebook, Twitter, and all such other social media that are manifestations of the smorgasbord of information that is the internet, to use social media as ways to heal all that divides and separates us. Humanity will be astonished when it grasps how it can wield the saber of technological prowess to cut away all of the crushing forces that serve to divide and reduce us to a mere fraction of what we could be. We will transform so much as a species, that we will catalogue a quadrillion or so ways we can foster that most precious of all states of mind using technology. And then, we will even more vigorously shake the sleep from our eyes, and think of a million more ways we can cultivate this thing that is so much greater than a thing, and more of a quality. Namely; the quality of wakefulness.

Wakefulness will be the succulent stew we taste each glorious morning we rouse ourselves from our stupefying slumber. It will be the pungent aroma of the celestial tea we drink at the midday of our great journey to discover that part of our being that never dies. Social media, in this new, more humane world, will be used powerfully to network with everything and everyone around us. We will create new vibrant spiritual communities where we will share our mythic wisdom gathered through our rich personal explorations of consciousness. The internet will attain a consciousness of sorts, and become the neural network for Gaia. Through it, humanity will be able to transcend the longstanding barriers that served to divide it into warring factions. Barriers such as race, class, and gender will fall away as we become spiritually attuned to one another.

Its impact will be immediate, but also enormously and unimaginably, cosmic. We will use virtual reality and quantum physics, nanotechnology and string theory, artificial intelligence and many other tools previously thought to have no transcendent dimension to them, to catapult our species to new heights of spiritual empowerment. We will shake the planetary community to its core, until the spiritual energies we generate radiate outwards to nearby galaxies, and then exponentially increase, until their great luminous power goes on to alter the destinies of so many beings intertwined in the benevolent web of an alive presence which exists everywhere, even in the cold intergalactic void.

If we do not consider this possibility, we must surrender to the probability that technology will not be our loving servant, but rather, our usurping child, who rejects our maternal attention, and instead, chooses to suffocate us as we sleep. For if we do not find a way to spiritualize our technological tools, they will, most assuredly, be the cunning agents of our demise. But, if we find our way out of this philosophical impasse, we will assure a glorious future for humanity, and we will discard our physical bodies, because at that point, we will not need them anymore to navigate the wonders of the universe.

For we will so advance as a species, that we will be able to traverse the intergalactic gulf that separates us from our extraterrestrial brethren, without needing the crutch of technology. We will be able to feel in loving contact with all that exists in the material world. Every tree, rock and plant, and even the stars themselves. Everything around us is imbued with pulsating aliveness, and when you awake, you feel this in every moment. Everybody must have an intuitive feeling that we are all swimming in a multidimensional sea of sentience; awash in a teeming intelligence of all kinds, from the subatomic to the divine. We will learn to imprint ourselves onto the very fabric of space-time, and be able to one day to utterly discard this immensely creative sandbox we call the universe. At this point, we will grow out of our evolutionary infancy, into a vibrancy of spirit that we never had the power to ever before envision. Call me naive, but I cannot but help to believe in this glorious vision. Furthermore, and call me a heretic, but I think technology can be an integral part of realizing this vision. How can I not, when I love humanity so much, and see so many spiritual possibilities in both it and technology, its much maligned offspring, that I weep in expansive joy for both, and when I consider what magnificent dreams they are capable of?

Despite what some have told you, we can see into the invisible realm. We can go there when we suspend our disbelief, and when we discard out our cynicism and our jaded world-view. If we surrender to the magic around us, the universe will collapse in grateful awe. How can it not, when we connect lovingly with the majesty of everything? You must see the magic that is everywhere and let it entirely swallow you up, until nothing is left of your former self except for pure awareness, and you have the power to exude magic to everyone you meet. The air itself and the molecules of our body have a kind of magic in them. We need to get far beyond all that interferes with our seeing the infinite glories hidden in plain sight in the material world. I for one am a firm believer that there are wondrous things entirely hidden away in the velvet folds of the fabric of reality that cannot be seen by the human eye. This does not make them any less real; only that in order to be able to see into the invisible places where things of a spectral nature make their home, one must have a clarity of perception that only is only realized when you are seeing with the inner eye. What I am really talking about are phenomena like parallel dimensions, space-time singularities, fairies and elves; angels and demigods, extraterrestrial visitors, and angelic entities, of such otherworldly brilliance, that if they ever appeared in front of you in their naked beauty, would make you drop to the ground and you would be completely agog and entirely unable to utter a single word of human speech. There are many other wondrous things that are too numerous to catalogue. But I am not here to provide you with an astral field guide to the amazing sights we cannot see with our physical eyesight, nor offer you field trips into these transcendent landscapes, but instead, to inspire you with your ability to see, and even interact, with these magical manifestations of the divine.

Our perceptions become clouded over when we are no longer able to muster enough faith to believe in the unseen, and because we cannot do this, we will be wholly unable to see the glittering strands of sacredness out of which the entire universe is woven. We need to burnish our perceptual mirrors, so that they can brilliantly reflect the blindingly white light of the indescribable beauty that emanates out of every pore of creation. It is tragic when we cannot remember how to do this, for our potential for joy greatly decreases when we cease gazing with awestruck eyes into the multifaceted jewel that is the transcendent. We must look penetratingly into the very heart of the universe with a clear and discerning eye, and we do this by becoming intimate with the holy innocence that dwells in the center of our being. There are many things in this invisible kingdom that are much more real than anything in our so-called “real” universe.

You know this, without a shadow of a doubt, when you look into the eyes of a young child, and see the effervescent magic that lies therein. Or, when you ponder the starry skies on a moonless night, and feel an inexplicable kinship with these distant suns, who you may recognize as beings in their own right. There is a whole kingdom of astonishing things we will be able to see if only we cleanse our perceptions, and when we do, we will become quite overcome with such an immensity of joy, that it will knock us to our feet. But that’s not the end of it, because we will be stunned when we discover how unimaginably sacred and holy creation really is. We must always remember, too, that Nature is a cathedral, and to be able to see the invisible choir of blessed beings who fill the forest air with joyful hymns, you need to bring a profound reverence with you into this peaceful place. Walk out into the most beautiful forest you know of, and become intoxicated by the exquisite beauty.Watch it in the spires of the pine trees reaching out to touch heaven. Observe it, with reverent attention, in the decaying logs as you watch their atoms breaking down into a nourishing chemical stew. These particles are destined to compose a future body of yours. You are constantly exchanging your molecules with those of the universe around you. Is that not miracle enough for you? What other magic or miracles do you need? You can and should be the witness as your physical body dematerializes and is replaced by one that is celestial in composition. Don’t worry – you can always come back to the earth in physical form. You will eventually discover that the universe is much more beautifully alive than you could ever possibly hope to understand.

Magic is merely the ability to see the miraculous in everyday life. Nothing more and nothing less. Magical awareness is something that we can cultivate, and should work on cultivating. It is not something frivolous, but should be an essential part of the way we look at things. It is a recognition of a sacred aspect to existence. Magical awareness is to see the ethereal splendor that we are literally swimming in, which includes all of the bright worlds that co-exist peacefully with our own. Without seeing how we are connected to a myriad of other realities, we limit our glorious possibilites to a mere sliver of what they could be. We are magical beings, with magical bodies, and to not see ourselves in that manner, is to do a grave disservice to both ourselves and all the other wonderful human beings with whom we share a planet.

In my dreams during the darkest hours of the night, soft whispers fill the air as I stand beside a bubbling stream. The healing waters collect the late afternoon sunlight and reflect it back to me as scintillating diamonds that dance before my eyes like mischievous sprites. These musical murmurations belong to a voice of such singular purity, that it must arise from a world that lies far beyond our own. A world that is bound too tightly to reason, and because of this, can no longer see what it can learn from the natural realm. This voice is telling me to start a journal which I should call the “Book of Light”, and use it to chronicle the subtle variations of this intriguing phenomenon. How it appears in different environments, and how my ever-changing moods might affect the way I perceive it. I consider the idea, and think that would be illuminating.

Light is a wonderful energy that greets us with loving warmth from the harsh coldness of space. It is ethereal; yet quantifiable, and it is a powerful natural force. Light exudes a beauty we take too much for granted, even though it is such a precious thing; for it is the sun’s own life-giving beneficence. I want to spend a lifetime being a student of it, and experience its endless nuances and shades. I would give anything to fly to a sun-dappled tropical island, and spend many pleasant hours contemplating the endless ways the light interacts with the clouds and the sea. To witness a profusion of rainbows birthed by the lapping waters, as they leap, in a quiet explosion of colors, from one part of the turquoise bay that marks the entrance to the island, to the other side. I desire to venture deep within the wild beauty of Alaska, and be mesmerized by the lambent curtains of the aurora borealis. I would seek out a secluded timberland above the Arctic Circle, and experience the healing lunar radiance I imagine I would find underneath the polar moon. It is wondrous beyond compare, when you think about it; all of these photons, dancing emissaries of the interstellar realm, travelling incredible distances through the interstellar void, and bathing our planet in a perfect energetic bliss. I can learn much about light, if I am receptive to the wisdom that it longs to teach me.

While I am out in the great woodland areas of our beautiful planet to contemplate the wisdom that is hidden in the glory of a sunrise, I will pray for the coyotes and the bears and the wolves, and the other myriad woodland creatures. I will not consider them merely as obstacles in my path, or enemies to be conquered. Instead, I will perceive them as my spiritual brothers and sisters, who just happen to have animal bodies. I will see past the fierceness which they have donned like a mask and see that like me, they are really the light made manifest. In fact, I know because I radiate no harmful energy, that these beings will join me on my quest. Perhaps not in a literal sense, but their presence will radiate outwards and this energy will silently uplift my soul. There, out in beauty of the forest, Nature will bestow me with gifts of the spirit, and I will gather wonderful memories of my sojourn there to take with me back to the darkness of a world that has forgotten the lessons of the Book of Light.